The present disclosure relates to packaging for pourable materials, and in particular, to a box with a slide opening and an integral liner for containing and dispensing pourable items such as cereal or other foodstuffs.
A wide range of pourable products such as dry cereals, small cookies or crackers, pet foods, powdered laundry soap and many others are held in and dispensed from cardboard box containers. Often, to preserve the freshness of food products and prevent leakage of fine particle food and other products, these boxes enclose a sealed waxed paper or plastic bag for holding the manufactured product. While effectively containing and preserving the manufactured products, opening such a container is a cumbersome process. A user must open the top of the box and then manipulate and tear open the bag held within. If the sealed top of the bag is not carefully torn open, the bag may rip down the side, spilling product.
Conventional folding cartons are also ill suited for re-closure, especially since users customarily dispense only a portion of the contents at a time. After opening the box and dispensing some of the product, users must attempt to re-close the bag by folding or rolling up the open top. This must be done with the bag in the box (if removed, the bag may deform and no longer fit), and results in a partially closed unsealed bag prone to spilling product between the bag and the box.
The containers themselves are also difficult to close. Typical closures are the cartons flaps glued onto each during manufacture. For commercial cereal boxes, after opening, to close the box users must open a slit in the flap and bend the flap of the box top to insert a tab in the slit. Opening the box top frequently results in tearing and ruining the closure. Also, the slit must be opened along a perforation, which frequently results in tearing it to the edge of a flap also rendering the closure inoperable. Even if the slit is preserved and the tab carefully inserted therein, the closure is prone to unwanted opening.
Standard cereal boxes are typically delivered in a tube-shaped standard folding carton, partially assembled and collapsed condition. When manufacturing boxes in large quantities, e.g. for mass distribution of breakfast cereals, it is preferable to have the box delivered to the filling machine as a folded flat. Automated machinery at the food processor opens up the flat carton, folds and secures top or bottom flaps to form a box with an open end. Next the filling machine fills the box with product, and then glue closes the box to be a ready consumer package.
Applicant has developed packages of new and differing functionality which offer significant improvements in dispensing, closing and reopening yet maintaining the manufacturing and filling process the same as standard folding cartons which work with conventional high speed machinery, over the prior art, and keeping the look of a standard carton for the consumer's familiarity. Applicant is the named inventor on numerous U.S. patents directed to specialty packaging including U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,116,499, 6,273,332, 6,360,942, 6,435,402, 6,945,449, 7,040,528, 7,156,286 and 7,743,973, and application Ser. No. 12/686,252 filed Jan. 12, 2010. These patents and the pending application show the progression of Applicant's innovative packaging designs, and how they have evolved to become friendlier to the high-speed form, fill and seal machines used by major food processing companies in producing hundreds of packages per minute.
While Applicant's display package design and the technology described in existing patents offer many advantages over the prior art, there remains a need for a mass producible box with a sealed bag inside, for storing and maintaining the required liner by cereal manufacturing companies, while providing dispensing portions of the contents and re-closing the box with ease. The need exists for a box for containing pourable items where the liner bag is conveniently constructed along with the box, and the liner bag can be opened and closed as the box is opened and closed by a convenient slide opener. The need also exists for a box capable of maintaining high speed production manufacturing that can actually be manufactured by the food companies because it offers the economical advantage of high volume mass production.